Sun Kissed

  “Like discussing the mess you’re in.”

  Samantha didn’t want to think about that. “I’m sure it’s all going to come right in the end. In time, the police will dig deeper and realize I had nothing to do with the deaths of my horses.”

  “No,” he said softly, “I’m afraid they won’t, not if Steve Fisher has his way.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The bastard isn’t just bent on harming your horses, sweetheart. He’s going after you as well.”

  Samantha couldn’t see why he believed Steve was coming after her. “I’m sorry; I’m not following.”

  “That day on the courthouse steps, when he promised to make you sorry for cheating him out of what he felt was rightfully his, he didn’t intend to merely take the horses away from you. He meant to make you pay in far worse ways, with years and years of your life.”

  “In prison?” she asked thinly, even though she already knew the answer.

  “Exactly.”

  An awful coldness moved through Samantha. Until that moment she hadn’t analyzed Steve’s motives. She’d believed he meant only to break her heart by harming the creatures she loved so much. “Oh, my God.”

  “Sweetheart, you’ve got to trust me.” His blue eyes locked on hers, their expression imploring. “After all that Steve has done, I know trusting me or anyone else outside your family isn’t easy for you. But, damn it, you have to try. Will you do that for me—just for a while? I may be your only ace in the hole.”

  Samantha already trusted him. It had happened bit by bit as she’d come to know him, but it was a done deal now. She trusted in his word. She admired his ethics. She respected his heartfelt concern for the animals he treated and his sterling professional standards. In short, she’d come to believe in him in a way she’d never thought might be possible.

  “Oh, Tucker, I do trust you, honestly I do, but how on earth do you think you can help me?”

  “How long does it take for an oral dose of morphine to affect a horse?”

  “I…” Samantha searched her store of knowledge. “I don’t know.”

  “I do. After a horse ingests a large amount of arsenic, how long does it take for the poison to take effect?”

  Her response was the same. “I don’t know.”

  “Neither do the cops, but I do. In fact, I know exactly what the window of time is. Was Steve in town shortly before or during that window of time? And where was he the day Blue Blazes went nuts from an opiate overdose?”

  “I don’t know,” she whispered.

  “Neither do I. But, damn it, we’re going to find out. The son of a bitch is doing his damnedest to frame you. Everything I put into that report today implicates you. Who stands to gain financially by the deaths of those horses? You. Who had the most opportunities to poison them? You. Who has been around horses all her life and knew what morphine would do to Blue? You. Who had motive? You. He’s trying to crucify you. If he has his way, you’ll be put behind bars for a very long time. Do you know the penalty for cruelty to animals in this state?”

  “I’ve never been cruel to my animals,” she protested.

  “I know you haven’t, honey, but name me one thing crueler than feeding horses arsenic. If Steve has his way, the cops will arrest you on charges of cruelty to animals, and trust me, the penalty for animal abuse is pretty damned stiff in this state. Top that off with a conviction of attempted insurance fraud, and you could be an old woman by the time you’re released from prison. It isn’t the horses Steve’s after. They’re only a means to an end. He’s out to get you.”

  What he was saying made a terrible kind of sense. She made a fist in her hair and stared at him in appalled horror. “Oh, Tucker, what on earth am I going to do?”

  “You’re going to trust me,” he said evenly. “Right now the cops have their heads up their asses, because everything they’ve come up with so far points to you. We can’t just sit back and let them reach the obvious conclusions. We have to blow all their theories sky-high.” His eyes filled with that glint of determination she’d seen so many times when he fought to save an animal. Only this time it was her life on the line. “You don’t honestly think I’m going to stand aside and let that son of a bitch do this to you.”

  Tugging his notepad from his shirt pocket, he said, “Down to brass tacks.” He slapped the pad onto the table, leafed back several pages from the front, and began reading his notations aloud, reminding her with every word of the night Blue Blazes had gone loco and how long it had taken for the drug to leave his system. “According to Jerome, the cob was fed to the stallion sometime between ten and eleven, probably closer to eleven. Blue went nuts about twenty minutes after Jerome went upstairs. You told me yourself that Jerome would have given the cob to Blue Blazes toward the last, because his stall is at the back of the arena.”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “Which makes the timing perfect. It takes from twenty to thirty minutes for an oral dose of opiate to affect a horse.”

  “We never had the cob analyzed, though.”

  “You and your father didn’t think to have it analyzed, but I did, and the report corroborates our suspicion that the white powder was morphine, as do the blood panel results I had run on Blue Blazes that night. The lab tech told me she thought he was fed morphine tablets crushed into a powder that stuck to the molasses coating the cob particles.”

  Samantha stared at him blankly. “But we already knew it was morphine. How does any of this help me?”

  “The cops are undoubtedly assuming that the cob was laced with morphine at feeding time, which implicates you or Jerome, because everyone else had left. Only I quizzed Jerome, if you’ll remember, and the nighttime treats are dished up and put on a shelf at the end of day shift to save him time late at night. All he had to do was grab the bowls and take them to the designated stalls, not measure out all the cob.”

  Samantha still couldn’t see why that seemed so significant to him. “I’m sorry. I’m still not following.”

  “Think.” His blue eyes locked on hers. “Around four o’clock, maybe later, depending on when the dayshift crew left that day, Blue Blazes’s dish was filled with the appropriate amount of cob by either Kyle, Nan, or Carrie and put on the shelf in its designated spot, which is clearly marked by Blue’s stall number. Between ten and eleven, Jerome removed the bowl from the shelf and took it to Blue’s stall. What went on between four or five o’clock and ten or eleven? No one watched those dishes. It was afternoon when the bowl was put there and late evening when it was removed. The paddock doors were all open. Anybody could have sneaked onto the property during those hours and laced Blue’s cob with morphine.”

  “Steve,” she whispered.

  “Exactly. If he was in town between four and ten, it’s a nail in his coffin. It won’t be enough, not standing alone. But what if we can prove he was also in town during the window of time for the arsenic to have been fed to Cilantro and Hickory? The horses were given their evening hay around six, but horses don’t always eat all their hay immediately. They munch, walk away, nibble at their grain or grass in the paddock, and then come back. It can take two hours, sometimes three before they finish up. Arsenic’s time of action is between a few to several hours. Was Steve in the area between six and nine that night? If so, he could have driven out here to contaminate the hay after Jerome forked it into their stalls, and he would have been long gone before the horses started getting sick.”

  “The time frame works, I suppose.”

  “Damn straight it works. They were fed the hay at six, and they died around eleven. If Steve slipped into the stall sometime between six and seven to poison the hay, that leaves a four-hour lapse, plenty of time for the arsenic to do its work.”

  “But in your report, you suggested that outdated swine or poultry feed was the most likely arsenic source. How could feed be successfully mixed with hay?”

  “Steve could have just dumped the feed on top.”

  “But wouldn?
??t it have fallen down through the hay as the horses ate? They nudge the hay around a lot as they’re eating.”

  “I’m guessing that the horses probably ate the feed first. It’s tastier than hay as a general rule. But outdated feed isn’t the only possible arsenic source. If you search through any old storage shed, you’re likely to find out dated stuff on the shelves that may contain high concentrates of arsenic. It’s also possible to order crap like that over the Internet and get it into the country undetected.”

  Samantha shivered as she recalled entering that stall to find the horses down. “Maybe we should check the floor of their stall for trace evidence.”

  “The cops have probably already done that, and in my opinion, the results of an analysis can only prove what we already know—that the horses died of arsenic poisoning. What we don’t know is if Steve Fisher was within driving distance of this ranch during the crucial times. If we can prove he was, that will be two counts against the bastard, which will certainly be enough to make the cops take a serious look at him and serve him with a search warrant. I’d bet my last dollar they’ll find trace evidence of arsenic somewhere on his property or inside his house.”

  “You’ve really thought this through.”

  “Of course I’ve thought it through—” He broke off and searched her gaze. “You’re very important to me—the most important person in my life, as a matter of fact.”

  “We’ve only known each other about a month, Tucker.”

  “Yes, but it hasn’t been an ordinary month,” he replied. “We’ve been with each other in trying situations that most couples don’t experience in a lifetime. You’re one of the most wonderful people I’ve ever known.” His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed hard. “I meant what I said earlier. I love you, Sammy.”

  She was standing on the edge of that high cliff again, and the earth was crumbling beneath her feet. Only this time she was ready to take the plunge. “I’m falling in love with you, too,” she said tremulously. “It scares the hell out of me to say those words, Tucker, and it’s even scarier to feel the way I do. I realize now that I never loved Steve, not really. I only thought I did. That said, he still had the power to break my heart, and a huge part of me is terrified to make myself vulnerable like that again.”

  “I know,” was his only response, but somehow that was all she needed to hear.

  Abandoning his notepad, he pushed to his feet, came around the table, and sat on a chair beside her. Before she guessed what he meant to do, he grabbed her wrist, tugged her toward him, and scooped her up onto his lap.

  “Let’s give that kiss another try, shall we?” he whispered.

  He moved one hand up her spine to the nape of her neck, then pushed his fingers into her hair, tightening them into a fist over her curls. Before she could react or even breathe again, his mouth came down over hers, hot and demanding one moment, then sweetly hesitant the next. Every tender brush of his lips robbed her of the ability to think clearly and filled her with a painful yearning simply to be with him.

  “Oh, Tucker,” she murmured into his mouth.

  He went from gentle to passionate in a heartbeat, his kiss deepening, his tongue pushing past her lips to taste the inner recesses of her mouth. Samantha’s head spun dizzily. She clutched his shoulders, half-afraid she might fall, because the whole room seemed to spin out of control. This was how desire felt. She’d yearned to experience it with Steve and never had. She’d believed at the time that she was too nervous, too self-conscious, or too inexperienced to feel real physical longing. Now, in Tucker’s arms, she realized how wrong she’d been. With the right man, the needs sprang up from nowhere, and they made her forget everything, even the tenets of her faith.

  Somehow they made their way to her living room. Somehow she ended up beneath him on the sofa. Somehow her robe disappeared, and he was learning her body with his mouth and hands, making her ache with need in places she hadn’t even realized existed until now. When his mouth found her breast, she felt as if all the fireworks for a Fourth of July display went off inside her at once. She gasped, made fists in his hair, and arched her spine to accommodate him. When his denim-clad knee pushed between her thighs, she made no move to stop him.

  She wanted this more than she’d ever wanted anything. It wasn’t about choices. Her body was issuing primal demands as old as womankind, and every fiber of her being thrummed with urgency.

  But Tucker suddenly jerked away. She blinked stupidly, her nerve endings screaming for him, her mind not able to grasp where he’d gone.

  “Tucker?”

  “I’m sorry,” he rasped. “I just…No way, not like this.”

  Her searching gaze finally found him in the shadows. He’d slid off the sofa onto the floor. She pushed dizzily up on one elbow to look down at him. Light from the kitchen barely illuminated one side of his face. His eyes gleamed like chips of muted silver as he raked a hand through his hair. A muscle ticked in his cheek.

  Samantha couldn’t understand why he had stopped. His every gesture and even the rigid brace of his shoulders told her it hadn’t been easy for him. So why had he drawn away? As she stared at him, her vision sharpened until she could see his expression, stony with resolve.

  He released a shaky breath, leaned his head back to stare at the pitch blackness above them, and finally asked, “Have you ever known a couple who seems to have found absolute magic?”

  Suddenly embarrassed to be lying there nude, Samantha wished for her robe and settled for a sofa pillow instead. As she drew it over her breasts, she said, “Not really, no. My parents, I guess. To this day my dad’s never looked at another woman, so far as I know. But my mom died when I was born, and I never saw them together.”

  He shifted to brace his back against the coffee table so they were facing each other. “I’m surrounded by couples like that,” he informed her in a gravelly voice. “People who truly love each other. For them, it goes way deeper than sex.” He curled his fingers over open air and made a tight fist. “You can’t see it, but it’s real. Something wonderful and precious and rare.” He paused for emphasis. “And now I think I’ve finally found it myself—with you.”

  Tears sprang to her eyes. “Oh, Tucker.”

  “Please don’t think this is a line. I know it sounds corny.”

  Samantha hadn’t been thinking anything of the kind, but the moment he spoke, she realized she should have been. Guys weren’t romantic. She had four brothers and knew that for a fact. To them, the perfect date included sex, followed by pizza and beer, preferably sans females so they could belch and channel-surf in peace. They definitely avoided waking up in the morning with a head on the pillow next to theirs.

  “So if it’s not a line, what is it?”

  He propped an elbow on his knee and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Hell, I don’t know.” Silence. Then, “An epiphany, I guess.” He dropped his hand to gesture at the sofa. “This is how it always happens. I can’t let it be that way with you. This is special. You’re special. It can’t be like all the other times when it meant nothing. I’m afraid it’ll jinx us—that I’ll blow it…that I’ll end up wanting to kick myself for not treating you the way you deserve to be treated.”

  “I see.”

  “If you knew my family, maybe you’d understand. For starters, there’s my parents. They’ve been married for…what?…forty years or more? And after all that time they still love each other. Then there are all my brothers, making happy with the loves of their lives and starting families. I’m the only one who’s never found that with anyone. Until I met you, I’d started to believe I never would. Now, here we are, I’m crazy about you, and damned if I know what should come next.”

  Samantha brushed at her cheeks. “Do you know where my robe went?”

  He gave her an odd look. Then he flipped over onto his knees to search for it. He returned with the white terry bunched in his fist and handed it to her. While Samantha drew the soft material over herself, he said, “It can’t be about
sex. Not only about that, anyway. Not when it’s the real thing. There are steps to take, rules to follow. You don’t just jump into it.”

  Samantha had been following the rules all her life. For once, she’d been ready to toss them all to the wind. She stuffed an arm down a sleeve and sat up, careful to keep herself covered while she finished donning the robe. “Is this some kind of role reversal?”

  He chuckled humorlessly. “I guess maybe so. I can’t do it like this, not with you.”

  She narrowed her eyes at him. “Only with other women?”

  “Exactly,” he said, then noted her expression and quickly added, “Not anymore, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  She pushed to her feet, stepped around the coffee table, and started toward the kitchen.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I have an appointment with a bottle of wine.”

  Moments later as she topped off her goblet with white zinfandel, he joined her in the kitchen. Over the rim of the goblet, she met his gaze. “Cheers.”

  He sank onto a chair. Samantha knew she’d never seen a handsomer man. After watching her gulp wine for a moment, he said, “I’m not very good with words sometimes.”

  “Really?” She curled her hand around the neck of the wine bottle. As she sloshed more into her glass, she said, “I never would’ve guessed.”

  “I’ve offended you.”

  Samantha thought about that for a moment. Aside from the fact that she suddenly felt about as desirable as a railroad tie compared to all the other women he’d slept with, she thought she’d handled the rejection fairly well. “My ego has been bruised a bit.” She tried to smile. “With other women you forget all the rules and just go for it, but with me, your thought processes are still in fine working order.” She lifted her glass to him. “That puts me pretty low on the desirability chart, the way I see it.”

  “That isn’t how I meant it at all!”

  She took another large swallow of wine. “It doesn’t matter. You’ve actually done me a big favor. I’m a practicing Catholic, remember.”